Ouya newbies: First-time developers bet big on $99 Android console

How 4 indie devs are realizing their dream to get a game into the living room.

Marco Williams never knew how hard game development would be. He and the team at Hashbang Games—which included his brother and his best friend—spent eight months working on Orbital Blaster, a space shooter that pays homage to games like Galaga. The development process was riddled with problems from the get-go, and even the process of making a simple game turned out to be a bigger endeavor than expected. To make matters worse, Williams' effort to fund the game's development on Kickstarter failed at around three percent of its $75,000 funding goal.

“I've never designed and developed games before,” he admitted to Ars over the telephone. “I have a 15-year background of programming, but I've never successfully designed and launched a game.”

It was in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign that Williams was inspired to try his hand at full-scale game development for the first time. His inspiration was based on the promise behind one word: Ouya. The $99 cube-shaped, Android-powered, TV game console has been generating intense interest from independent game developers new and old since it attracted the support of 63,416 Kickstarter backers last year. The system will ship out to its initial backers on March 28 (ahead of a June launch to the general public), so many developers are gearing up to finally see their games on their living room TVs for first time. Heck, many will be seeing their game simply become playable for the first time.

Of the 480 launch titles compiled by one Ouya fan forum, a great number are being made by small-time developers with little to no experience making games. There really aren't any big budget, triple-A titles to speak of unless you count a few indie success stories that are porting their titles over from iOS and Android. Overwhelmingly, the Ouya's first crop of developers are regular people who see the system as their chance to break into the game industry—on a device that's geared toward people just like them.

You might think these developers would want to try their hand at developing for the established PC or mobile platforms. After all, it's a risk to develop for an unreleased console being made by an Internet startup with no track record and no proven market share. But when talking to a few first-time developers who are supporting the Ouya in a big way, the same message is heard again and again. This tiny, unproven box represents a way to fulfill their dream of getting a game on their TV set. It can turn indie gaming into something bigger than it is now.

Mobile is OK, but console is better

“If the Ouya was not launching, I would still be doing mobile contracting right now,” said Zachary Burke, one half of the two-man development team at Hypercane Studios. “My previous day job was mobile development…kind of the hot place to be right now.”

Zachary and his brother Jacob have been working on Rage Runner for the past six months. Zachary handles the development, Jacob handles the art, and the soundtrack is provided royalty-free by an artist named Teknoax. Rage Runner is a three-dimensional, fast-paced obstacle avoidance game that feels quite a bit like the mobile title Star Wars: Trench Run. Each level takes about a minute to play flawlessly, but Zachary said that “typically you die so many times it’s more like 20 minutes.”

Hypercane Studios had originally planned on heading straight for the PC and using Steam as its distributor. But when the Ouya came along, Jacob said the duo was “stoked about this console for indie developers." The Android-based console seemed to address a lot of the issues that had the pair discounting mobile game development in the first place. "We've just gotten a sour taste for mobile development,” Jacob told Ars. “I myself, as an artist, hate limitations. That’s why the Ouya is so nice: it allows me to do higher poly counts and a lot more than we can do on mobile.”

For Zachary, the Ouya's physical, dual-stick controller was one of the big reasons the Hypercane team chose the console for the debut of their first gaming creation. “If you compare the amount of control you have on a phone with the amount of control on an old school Nintendo controller, you’re much more accurate on the latter,” he explained. “We were really interested in games that use physical controllers and that are four-player simultaneous on one screen, and that’s something you just can’t do on mobile right now."

Zachary also feels that platforms like the Xbox just don't seem as accommodating to indie developers. "I don't like the Xbox Indie Games [section]...They have that whole thing locked down and then they have a maximum file size you can't exceed." He added that "they kind of tuck away the indie games behind several different menus—I don't feel like they're front and center and I don't feel like they treat you like a real developer. It just feels something that's kind of behind the curtains...an area for 'sad' games to live."

To keep Rage Runner evolving and to keep the community engaged well beyond this initial launch, players will be able to create their own levels and then publish them to share with others in the community. But the pair is already worried about the long-term financial implications of remotely storing those customized levels and things like players' high scores. “We’re really concerned about breaking even on server cost,” Zachary said. “A flat purchase fee… we would lose money on, and we obviously want to avoid that situation.” He added that they’ll be looking at in-app purchases to allow players to unblock certain features as a revenue model.

The level editor that Hypercane Studios developed for Rage Runner.

Despite this challenge, the brothers remain optimistic about their future—and the Ouya’s. Zachary is particularly positive about Ouya’s recent announcement that it would be launching updated hardware every year. “You know you’re going to be able to unlock more graphics capabilities and have more power to work it,” he said. On the other hand, “it will be a little more work to make sure it runs… At least with the Ouya, it’s going to be one vendor, different hardware.”

Zachary is also looking forward to the opportunities the Ouya will bring. "We were just thrilled at the chance to have our game on people's TVs in their living room. That's not an opportunity that's been available to us in the past." He added that while they hope to be hugely successful, "if we just get our name on the map and we get a couple of fans out of it, I'm going to be pretty happy with that."

Making games for a better cause

Across the Pacific Ocean from Hypercane's efforts, Kamil Czajko and the first-time developers at Australia's Kactus Games are putting the finishing touches on an Ouya role-playing game called Legacy of Barubash. The game puts players in the role of Kaleb, a young hunter who is forced to venture out of the small village he always called home in order to save it. The ambitious team is trying to combine the story mechanics of a title like Dragon Age in a two-dimensional, classic Square Enix-like package. “All of the team members have grown up with video games,” the game's website says. “We wanted to best of the JPRG with what we enjoyed from the western style RPGs, as well as to make something more complex than a casual game for the Android platform.”

Kactus Games consists of Czajko and his wife Sue, who acts as art director, writer, and world creator, along with art assistant Jonathon Morald and a couple contractors in the Netherlands and New York who work on sound and art assets. The team is devoting significant resources to its first indie title. A blog post on the site details how Gina Zdanowicz, the New York-based contractor, recorded the theme music for one of the characters using the live recording of a harpist and a soprano at Serial Lab Studios.

Florence Ion
Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.

106 Reader Comments

OUYA is interesting, and might be a good emu platform, but it is little more. If indie devs want sales, they need to make games with the Steam marketplace in mind. Ouya will be a flash in the pan, and gone. It doesn't help that PS4 and Nextbox are going to suck up all the mind share this year.

Being on the launch slate is probably a good way of mitigating the risk. People are more likely to take a chance on games when they just want something to play on their shiny new gadget. Games for Ouya are also less likely to get swamped by the big-name productions that populate the major mobile/console stores. So it makes sense to have a go at this platform, as long at they get the code ready by June.

There really aren't any big budget, triple-A titles to speak of unless you count a few indie success stories that are porting their titles over from iOS and Android.

This is an oxymoron. Big-budget, Triple-A titles are by definition not Indie games, because indie games don't have a large budget. There are also few, if -any- big budget triple-A titles on iOS or Android. The only games that really fit that definition are the Final Fantasy titles that were ported to mobile from either the PS1, DS, or SNES.

I like the concept of the OUYA, but how many people are going to shell out $100 a year to stay current on their console that's only designed around indie games (for now, there are no real big-budget AAA developers going anywhere near the device). Why spend that money when you can buy a PS4 or new Xbox (or Wii-U I guess) and have a console with a multi-year lifespan and much higher pedigree.

This is like apple tv, the boxee box, or the roku set top. Cool, but doomed because it's too niche.

And while yes, being on the launch slate means you have to do zero marketing and can benefit from the gold rush, the future is still yet uncertain - what's keeping the Ouya store from becoming like the Apple App Store or Google Play in a year's time? Full of clones and crapps making it hard to find anything...

Of course, emulators will probably be the killer apps - play all your old console games on a new console...

OUYA is interesting, and might be a good emu platform, but it is little more. If indie devs want sales, they need to make games with the Steam marketplace in mind. Ouya will be a flash in the pan, and gone. It doesn't help that PS4 and Nextbox are going to suck up all the mind share this year.

I don't think the Ouya is going to compete in the same marketplace as the PS4. The PS4 will sell, but you have to have money to get anything on there. Even with the low cost to develop with the Nextbox, you still have to get Sony or Microsoft to accept you. The Ouya may appeal to a lot of casual gamers who won't buy $400+ game rigs. Sometimes bigger isnt better.

As I said before, at the least it is a cheap development platform for people who want to learn mobile programming.

Does anyone know if the Ouya will have any sort of core achievment system such as Gamer Score on Xbox, or Trophies on PSN? They have something similiar on the flash game website Kongregate.

I'm ashamed to admit how much this sort of feature motivates me to play. Not sure how tricky it is to implement but if achievments in game could be extended to a comparable Ouya 'level' I'm sure it could help drive sales. Bragging rights are a powerful incentive for myself and the gamers I know!

Certainly shows the naivete of most of these developers, but also perhaps the demand for any easy and user friendly way to get your controller centric game out. Ouya seemed like a solution looking for a problem, well at least on one end it looks like it's found the problem it's solving. Having a "game" centric platform with a controller certainly seems to be the draw.

How well that will translate into financial success, for anyone involved, remains questionable. Will any of these be anything more than the hordes of games on the iOS and Android App stores? Almost certainly not. But it still opens up the idea of similar success as things like Angry Birds and Temple Run on a more "Game" friendly control scheme.

That all these developers have turned up for the Ouya, when the PC has been as open as possible for decades now, does lend the question of where they all were before. Maybe the Ouya has the same mental niche in people's minds that the "Console" type system does, something somewhow easier to wrap your mind around playing a game with, really perhaps the only thing consoles have ever had going for them over a PC anyway besides what used to be a simpler, more direct interface.

Still, that this mental niche exists makes me interested in Valve's Steambox and opening up Steam as publishing service. If such a thing can provide the same mental space for the average consumer, with more thought, reliability, and polish than the newcomers of Ouya can provide, Valve may just do very well indeed.

There really aren't any big budget, triple-A titles to speak of unless you count a few indie success stories that are porting their titles over from iOS and Android.

This is an oxymoron. Big-budget, Triple-A titles are by definition not Indie games, because indie games don't have a large budget. There are also few, if -any- big budget triple-A titles on iOS or Android. The only games that really fit that definition are the Final Fantasy titles that were ported to mobile from either the PS1, DS, or SNES.

I like the concept of the OUYA, but how many people are going to shell out $100 a year to stay current on their console that's only designed around indie games (for now, there are no real big-budget AAA developers going anywhere near the device). Why spend that money when you can buy a PS4 or new Xbox (or Wii-U I guess) and have a console with a multi-year lifespan and much higher pedigree.

This is like apple tv, the boxee box, or the roku set top. Cool, but doomed because it's too niche.

That possible. But the AppleTV went from being a tinker toy to a main product. The Boxxee Box and the Roku keep selling. Hardware doesn't have to have total market domination to be successful.

The Ouya is a fantastic opportunity for the entire videogame medium. Right now, if you want to get into peoples living rooms you have to seriously censor your game. No publisher will fund a development effort for an idea that contains even the slightest risk that the ESRB, BBFC, OFLC, or countless other censorship bodies around the world would find it inappropriate for the under-18 crowd. All 3 major console manufacturers long ago declared that they would never license a game rated as 18+ only for their platform (to essentially no concern in the gaming community whatsoever - if such a thing were tried in the film or book industry there would have been blood in the streets). Being forced to pay for ESRB rating (which costs thousands of dollars) and being forced to shy away from anything that couldn't be included in a PG-13 movie (unless you are a billion-dollar publisher, then you can get away with just a little more but nothing approaching what is standard fare for R rated films) has infantilized the entire medium of videogames. While there are a few independent games on the PC platform that seek to accomplish taking the videogame medium into the realm of the artistic, they are seriously hampered in their ability to reach the public and the living room is almost entirely off-limits.

How important would literature be to us if Shakespeare was told that a story that involved teenagers falling in love and killing themselves was unacceptable, and they they would never publish something which involved a man killing his father, sleeping with his own mother, then gouging his eyes out? I am aware that the majority of the gaming community does not give a damn about art and most vehemently oppose the creation of any game that requires thought on the part of the player. That is not really relevant. Most readers do not seek out serious literature, and most movie watchers do not seek out arthouse films. Those elements of the medium are absolutely required, however, in order to fill out the medium. They are necessary to try new things, to experiment with ways of connecting more strongly with the audience, and to push the boundaries of what is seen as 'acceptable'.

We would have never seen 'Pulp Fiction' if not for the experimental arthouse film experiments of the 1970s. The same is true of nearly all significant work in any medium - they all owe the inspiration and education of their creators to independent UNRATED experiments, the feedback from audiences and critics, etc. Videogames have been prevented from entering this arena almost entirely and the standards that classify a game as "Mature" are an absolute mockery of the human brain. It requires no maturity whatsoever to fully enjoy what little Call of Duty and similar games have to offer. Steam on the PC has opened the market up a tiny bit, and more 'serious' games do make it on there occasionally, but Valve standing as the gatekeeper (something Gabe himself has said he sees as bad) means that the truly experimental, because they are not seen to be derivative of what has become before and therefore are perceived as having limited market appeal, don't even get TRIED. No one wants to work hard on a game only to see it never finding its way to anyone.

The existing consoles don't just provide a barrier to entry, they provide a hermetically sealed concrete dome. Even if you believe you can get your concept past the censors, you have to purchase developer kits that cost thousands, submit your game to committees that "manage the brand" of the console and forbid anything that doesn't fit the image they want to portray, pay high fees for a license in order for your game to be permitted to boot on the console, THEN you have to kick an extremely high per-copy fee to the console manufacturer (different platforms are a different amount, but it is usually 75-80% of retail price).

If we want to see the medium of videogames become and important long-lasting facet of our culture, it is going to have to escape the box it is currently trapped in where anything aimed at a crowd with more life experience than a teenager is off limits. I want to see the videogame equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus, Naked Lunch, On the Road, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Pulp Fiction, Schindler's List, Bad Boy Bubby, Funny Games, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, etc. Not videogame remakes of those works, but videogames of equal cultural significance. Videogames that communicate to the player a meaningful set of ideas. You may be saying 'those games sound like they wouldn't be any fun' but that is purely because your vision of what an entertaining videogame can be has been castrated by the current state of the medium. People might not be able to make games that communicate meaning in that way and still make them entertaining today. Why should we expect any different? They have no practice. They can't look back at the camerawork in Citizen Kane and learn from it. All they've got to go on are Pac-Man, Super Mario, and Call of Duty. We have to start building a library of videogames that are influential not to players, but to game designers and creators. That try things no one can or will try now. There are so many subject areas that are simply completely off-limits to game creators (especially those working with funding from a publisher).

I don't know if the Ouya is going to be this great. But I'm an optimist. And hopefully this will help forestall another collapse of the gaming industry that will likely come after the used game market is destroyed.

The Ouya may appeal to a lot of casual gamers who won't buy $400+ game rigs.

Those people will buy a WiiU. Have you actually looked at the horribly laughable lineup on the Ouya? If I were an indie developer there's only two places I would be looking right now: Steam and iOS (I forgot to mention iOS in my first post). If you can make a quality, low cost game you want to get it out to the widest number of people possible and make some damn money. The bills don't pay themselves.

I think a lot of people concentrate too much on the wrong things and waste time, effort, and money on useless endeavors. The Ouya concept is 'neat', but doesn't look profitable.

That Rage Runner game looks like a student project. That is not something I would be willing to pay for. And it's hilarious to me that the guy is complaining about poly counts when his art looks like placeholders.

If this stuff is all the Ouya has to offer it's going to be a very, very niche product. I wouldn't pay for any of this.

<snip>I don't know if the Ouya is going to be this great. But I'm an optimist. And hopefully this will help forestall another collapse of the gaming industry that will likely come after the used game market is destroyed.

Give it up, dude. Between Manhunt 2 and Rapeplay, commercial gaming has the whole gamut of gratuitous sex and violence covered.

Between Alan Wake and Fallout 3, you've covered all moral ambiguity options. Not much left on the moral compass once you've intentionally detonated a nuke.

If you're going to develop a game you hope to make money with you have to do it on a platform with users.

Otherwise this is a lot like starting up a band and only playing in your local pub. Sure, you might get a few bucks, but if you don't think bigger you'll never make any serious money and no, you aren't likely to be spotted by the big-boys either.

This is not a great reason, but there is literally a 0% chance I'll buy an Ouya in the near future. The reason is simple but also not intuitive: All my TV's inputs are spoken for! I don't have room for another $anything on the back-panel of my receiver, and there's no way I'm gonna get into the business of swapping cables around.

This is because of the combo of Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft consoles in my home, of course. Where I already have too many games to play.

I'm not sure I get who or what this device is for. People who want to play indies already have computers (or tablets, or phones). Indies are okay on the big screen but they're more my go-tos when I need portable gaming...

This is like apple tv, the boxee box, or the roku set top. Cool, but doomed because it's too niche.

Funny you should mention the ATV and Roku. I pre-ordered an Ouya when I read that it would be coming with Plex, specifically with the intent of using it for streaming my own DVD/Blu-Ray rips. I've been using an ATV for a few years now and while I very much prefer the experience in streaming my media vs the hassles of a disc, there are a few things that really aggravate me about the ATV. In particular, the lack of a persistent server running in the background (on my desktop.... iTunes must be open for the ATV); lack of DTS audio support; an overly simplified interface that doesn't collate multi-season TV shows under one listing; and more. I've used Plex on the desktop and it's simply awesome. I had a very bad experience trying it on a Roku, and with the Roku in general, but I'm expecting better out of it on the Ouya. The fact that I'll also be able to play some games on the Ouya is just a bonus for me. I'm pretty much past my gaming days and have never cared for console gaming (I'll take a mouse/keyboard over a controller any day), but I wouldn't mind being able to play a few casual games in my living room for a change.

This is not a great reason, but there is literally a 0% chance I'll buy an Ouya in the near future. The reason is simple but also not intuitive: All my TV's inputs are spoken for! I don't have room for another $anything on the back-panel of my receiver, and there's no way I'm gonna get into the business of swapping cables around.

This is because of the combo of Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft consoles in my home, of course. Where I already have too many games to play.

I'm not sure I get who or what this device is for. People who want to play indies already have computers (or tablets, or phones). Indies are okay on the big screen but they're more my go-tos when I need portable gaming...

Hmmmmm... do they still make video-connector switchboxes? My household has one of these from years back, which has inputs for all the regular sorts of video connectors such as the old S-Video, as well as the RCA connectors, and whatnot. We still use it because, while the TV has multiple inputs on the back that are selectable from the remote... the stand we have the TV on (which is second hand stuff that wasn't originally designed with TV gear in mind) makes it really hard to run the cables around from the devices under the, so we run most of the devices to that switcher and then run ONE set of cables to the TV.

Hardware wise the features offered isn't that bad for $99. This may indeed make the perfect XBMC.

That's the one thing that might sell me, especially if the OS is very open to modding. There aren't many decently powered, small boxes around. $100 is a little more than I'd want to pay, but until much lower price A15 boards hit in nice, clean boxes, I'm really tempted. Heck, Samsung's chromebook is one of the better options to get an A15 (comes with a case, screen, just a shame it runs ChromeOS).

Granted, release date is 3 months off. And I just can't see myself using it for gaming besides the odd, better than average exclusive they might get. If the indie market was really struggling, maybe, but I have Steam and humble bundles and all sorts of PC games I never finished playing. And the whole free to play model they're pushing doesn't sit well with me.

This is not a great reason, but there is literally a 0% chance I'll buy an Ouya in the near future. The reason is simple but also not intuitive: All my TV's inputs are spoken for! I don't have room for another $anything on the back-panel of my receiver, and there's no way I'm gonna get into the business of swapping cables around.

This is because of the combo of Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft consoles in my home, of course. Where I already have too many games to play.

I'm not sure I get who or what this device is for. People who want to play indies already have computers (or tablets, or phones). Indies are okay on the big screen but they're more my go-tos when I need portable gaming...

Hmmmmm... do they still make video-connector switchboxes? My household has one of these from years back, which has inputs for all the regular sorts of video connectors such as the old S-Video, as well as the RCA connectors, and whatnot. We still use it because, while the TV has multiple inputs on the back that are selectable from the remote... the stand we have the TV on (which is second hand stuff that wasn't originally designed with TV gear in mind) makes it really hard to run the cables around from the devices under the, so we run most of the devices to that switcher and then run ONE set of cables to the TV.

Why do people come on this forum to talk about how much they won't ever buy an Ouya? There was obviously a lot of people interested in the idea, its the second largest kickstarter so far. That's not counting the thousands of pre-orders. If you don't like it, don't buy it. No one here will be upset that you didn't.

Is there also an app that lets me play MP3s and MPGs off a Network Attached Storage box like one running NASlite ( http://www.serverelements.com/ ) or the like? I.e one that's just shared-out folders (i.e. you don't need some sort of front-end running ON the box that the media player device interacts with instead)?

I respect what they're trying to do but console gaming is the past and as the PC keeps evolving it will pull more and more players over to it.

I have nothing against console systems I grew up with nes, snes, sega, and the rest. I have every console that has been released in my lifetime "most are boxed up" but I don't see myself getting a PS4 not when gaming on a PC is not a big deal anymore. You can have your gaming system pretty cheap these days and I love it.

The amount of games for the PC is absurd and I enjoy trying many as I can especially foreign games. Just look at OSU one of the most unique games around. It's just something you cannot find in a Walmart and the best part is it's free. Path of Exile - Fucking EPIC! FREE

I don't know if the Ouya is going to be this great. But I'm an optimist. And hopefully this will help forestall another collapse of the gaming industry that will likely come after the used game market is destroyed.

There is a thing called a PC, you may have heard of it. There is nothing stopping someone from releasing whatever crazy game they dream up on the PC. None. They might have an issue selling it to someone beyond whatever group of weirdos is their target market though. But I fail to see how that is anyone else's problem.

Look at what a disaster Xbox Indie Games turned into, just piles of garbage. That is what the OUYA store will be. I sure thousands of people are waiting excitedly for Minecraft Clone, Minecraft Clone with Zombies and Zombie Game that has Minecraft parts in it.

...being forced to shy away from anything that couldn't be included in a PG-13 movie (unless you are a billion-dollar publisher, then you can get away with just a little more but nothing approaching what is standard fare for R rated films...

While I admit that I don't watch many movies anymore, it seems to me that plenty of videogames made within the last 10 years contain R-rated levels of realistically graphic violent mayhem, particularly in the FPS realm.

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taking the videogame medium into the realm of the artistic

Why would 'artistic' necessarily include graphic violence or sex, though? Most of the literary titles you mentioned -- ones like

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push the boundaries of what is seen as 'acceptable'

Which is more what you appear to be interested in...not art.

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We would have never seen 'Pulp Fiction' if not for the experimental arthouse film experiments of the 1970s.

Yes, *art house* film -- the equivalent of the online indie community. Not major motion picture seen in average theaters across the nation.

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the standards that classify a game as "Mature" are an absolute mockery of the human brain.

Yes and no. On the one hand, maturity in a mentally healthy adult human comes with reduced interest in shocking people, graphic violence, etc. so associating the presence of those things with one being 'mature' is inaccurate. On the other hand, graphic violence & explicit sex have been shown to negative effects on children's development, so "mature" in the sense of "for adults" would be about right.

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No one wants to work hard on a game only to see it never finding its way to anyone.

Of course not -- but if the kind of content you're talking about is what people really want, then it would be found and distributed if placed online in strategic places regardless. The big companies not carrying it doesn't deter the people interested in that kind of game; just ask the large community of people that enjoy playing, modifying, discussing, or creating retro-games.

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Videogames that communicate to the player a meaningful set of ideas. ... We have to start building a library of videogames that are influential not to players, but to game designers and creators.

We *do* have a library of games that were influential to creators of all types and players as well, particularly if you don't limit it to console titles! For a long time, there were plenty of games that tried totally new things, explored ideas or concepts, led people to see the world in a different way, even acted as a form of social criticism and/or the foundation of a personal value system -- all of the things that usually qualify something as a form of art. The people that created those games, from people that did it all on their own to the ones that specialized just in one specific facet like music composition, have also been named by later generations following in their footsteps.

Let me chuck on my rose-tinted glasses for a second... I'm a long-term gamer who has slowly got disillusioned with games - everything now seems too complicated and too time-consuming. I miss being able to dive into a game for twenty minutes. Now I need to remember the controls, remember where I was up to, remember which character said what, and I just don't care. I don't want a story or movie-like visuals, I just wanna have some fun

I'm hoping that the OUYA will let me rediscover some of that old magic

I'm also hoping we'll discover a bunch of new bedroom programmers. How else will we find the next Andrew Braybrook or Jeff Minter?

I'm also hoping we'll discover a bunch of new bedroom programmers. How else will we find the next Andrew Braybrook or Jeff Minter?

Well, you might try Steam. Or perhaps the thousands of Indie developers who are already out there struggling away on the internet at large.<edit>Just realised that post may have sounded sarcastic when read aloud in a certain tone, but it is not meant to be.

This is pretty much where I expect gaming will end up, save for dedicated PCs for the hardcore experiences. Pretty much the main perk of consoles was accessibility and (used to be) moderately powerful hardware, a niche that's filled as far as people need from phones they already own, and a device like this bridges that into the living room nicely. It's whether or not people WANT something that bridges the gap between their mobile games and a console for the living room that's the question, since they obviously already have an outlet for their games.

if they are putting this against their mortgages and credit, they very much are risking it all.

saying that, i think it's naïve and silly to bet your house on an untested platform with untested hardware with an unclear market. not when the pc is available with established audience. if you can't make a successful mobile game, idoubt it would work out with ouya either.

let's be clear. they are doing this to be first on the scene to get a chance at the initial revenue. after a while, titles will sink into the background and most games and devs will be fighting just to get noticed andyou'll see sinking revenue (out of a small revenue base as is).

most of those games highlighted don't seem particularly compelling even at .99c... most of these guys are going to go broke. if it was that important, ouya is not the smartest bet.